With propriety, therefore, Bernard teaches that the gate of salvation is opened to us, when in the present day we receive the Gospel with our ears, as death was once admitted at the same doors when they lay open to Satan.
Augustine? Bernard? Who were they? Dust and forgotten for the most part. But after them and before them men had lived, human beings, hoping, aspiring, falling, sinning. David Joslin, mountaineer, turned once more to the pages of the old dogmatist.
This is that hereditary corruption which the fathers called original sin; meaning by sin, the depravation of a nature previously good and pure; on which subject they had much contention. Yet this timidity could not prevent Pelagius from arising, who profanely pretended that the sin of Adam only ruined himself, and did not injure his descendants. But the temerity of the Pelagians and Celestians will not appear surprising to him who perceives from the writings of Augustine what a want of modesty they discover in everything else.
Every descendant from the impure source is born infected with the contagion of sin; and even before we behold the light of life, we are in the sight of God defiled and polluted. For “who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?” The Book of Job tells us, “Not one.”
We have heard that the impurity of the parents is so transmitted to the children that all, without a single exception, are polluted as soon as they exist. But we shall not find the origin of this pollution, unless we ascend to the first parent of us all, as to the fountain which sends forth all the streams. Thus it is certain that Adam was not only the progenitor, but as it were the root of mankind, and therefore, that all the race were necessarily vitiated in his corruption. What cavil will the Pelagians raise here?
And then John Calvin went on to tell David Joslin, sitting here in the saloon of John Moran, what sin was:
Wherefore, Augustine, though he frequently calls it the sin of another, the more clearly to indicate its transmission to us by propagation, yet, at the same time, also asserts it properly to belong to every individual. And the apostle himself expressly declares, that “death has therefore passed upon all men, for that all have sinned;” that is, have been involved in original sin, and defiled with its blemishes. And therefore infants themselves, as they bring their condemnation into the world with them, are rendered obnoxious to punishment by their own sinfulness, not by the sinfulness of another. For though they have not yet produced the fruits of their iniquity, yet they have the seed of it within them.
When arguing respecting corrupt nature, Paul not only condemns the inordinate motions of the appetites, but principally insists on the blindness of the mind and the depravity of the heart; and the third chapter of his Epistle to the Romans is nothing but a description of original sin.